Database queries are common in today's computing world. Many database queries have geographic locations specified as query criteria, or input parameters. For example, a user may wish to perform a query of a White Pages database to obtain the people named “Smith” located in “Redmond, Wash.” A typical database query will simply use “Redmond” and “WA” directly as query inputs for city and state fields, respectively. The database query will return records of those people living within the city limits of Redmond, Wash.
However, the user may not desire the query to be based on the city limits. An alternative is a query with a range. An example query with a range is to locate all of the database entries that are within a specific distance (e.g., 30 miles) from a specific geographic coordinate. The specific geographic coordinate may be specified directly as a latitude/longitude, or some other geographic coordinate system, or first converted (for example, from a specified city/state), to a specific geographic coordinate. Another query is then performed to obtain all of the records within the specified range from the geographic coordinate.
Regions known as direct marketing areas have been defined by Nielsen for the continental United States. These areas are based on television signal areas. This division is useful for business people for marketing and advertising purposes.
It is desirable to interject the use of direct marketing areas into database queries with geographic inputs. The present invention is directed to converting a geographic query input to a direct marketing area so as to accomplish this result.